So I suppose we’re seeing a gradual increase in poetry-related arts page filler. Also, with the death of poor Nicholas Hughes, expect the Sylvia nostalgia to continue (this one with some allstars editorializing for the NYT):

Suicide is humbling for us, the observers. In the case of Sylvia Plath, we have all the narrative information anyone could wish: her prose fiction, her poetry, her correspondence, her journals, and then the Husband’s, too.

With all this testimony — brave, generous, self-aware, subtle, forceful — we do not know. Does Ted drive her to it, and his next wife as well? Or is it progressive deterioration of the brain? (Now that we’re better at examining them, we can say that the brains of suicides look very bad.) Both, is the sophisticated conclusion, environment and genes, social circumstance and biology, cognition and animal drive — which is to conclude vaguely indeed.

“Of course there are two,” Plath writes in her poem “Death and Co.,” meaning the wife and the husband — but now one might think of the mother and the child. Two turns out to be a low estimate.

That said, here’s a decent remembrance of the day Romanticism died under the iron heel of Ezra Pound and his cabal of sack-of-doorknobs-swinging thugs.

History identifies them as fledgling imagists, artists who promoted poetry of personal impulse and, crucially, rebelled against set metres and rhyme, which had been established in English poetry since the 16th century. These were men and women in their 20s who saw the decline of Romanticism and wanted something new, a poetry based on images.

Richardson, who co-edited a book on the Imagists, argues that this was the first modernist movement to take place in London, marking a dramatic shift in poetry in the UK and the US. “The historical and cultural importance of this centenary is immense,” he said. “It just cannot be overemphasised.”

This week, Richardson will lead an imagist walk round central London, bringing to life some of the key venues and players such as Hulme, Storer and Flint — all there on day one — and, importantly, the American poet Ezra Pound, who first attended an Imagist meeting on 22 April and was to become its most famous practitioner.

“It’s those three meeting [Hulme, Flint, Storer] together, on the same night in the same place that makes this very important,” Richardson said. “A month later, the final piece of the jigsaw, Ezra Pound, starts attending. They meet for about 18 months, every Thursday evening.